China's science and technology has exploded, and a national sports-level "big gamble" has begun

Some people sigh that only a year has passed, but it seems like a century has passed.

Overnight, DeepSeek swept the world, and those who were not optimistic about us in the past have changed their strategies and re-examined Chinese technology.

In addition to the shift in public opinion, more far-reaching changes have occurred in the smart factories in the Yangtze River Delta, in the project books of the Hangzhou-Shenzhen factories, and in the desks of the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology and the local State-owned Assets Supervision and Administration Commission......

A new round of AI investment has emerged, and the intensity is beyond imagination -

Alibaba announced that it will invest more than 380 billion yuan in the next three years, more than the sum of the past ten years

Baidu, which recently added 10 billion, is expected to invest more than 100 billion in the next three years

ByteDance invested 80 billion last year and is expected to reach 160 billion this year

……

Large manufacturers are changing the frugality of the past two years and have begun to desperately spend money on cloud and AI infrastructure, AI native applications, etc.

Shocking events are happening one by one, and the signal is extremely unusual:

Following the central government's proposal of "patient capital", the most daring local policies have emerged. The state-owned assets of Huangpu District, Guangzhou, allow direct investment of seeds and angels to invest up to 100% of the loss of a single project, which is equivalent to a "gold medal for avoiding death";

Morgan Stanley, JPMorgan Chase, Goldman Sachs and other overseas institutions believe that China's core technology assets are systematically undervalued.

According to Bloomberg data, global hedge funds poured into China's stock market at the fastest pace in January in months, driving the total market capitalization of onshore and offshore markets to more than $1.3 trillion.

The MSCI China Index outperformed the India Index for three consecutive months, the longest consecutive rise cycle in two years;

……

When the most realistic big manufacturers, the most cautious state-owned assets, and the capital market that loves to listen to stories, while betting their chips in the direction of China's technology and AI, a far-reaching national fortune-level "big gamble" has kicked off, which is likely to subvert the future.

1

On the other side of the ocean, the investment momentum of technology giants is quite ferocious.

According to public information, Microsoft plans a special investment of $80 billion in AI data centers in fiscal year 2025; Amazon's 2025 capital expenditure budget will exceed $100 billion, with AI infrastructure as the core investment; Google's parent company, Alphabet, expects capital expenditures to reach $75 billion in fiscal 2025, also driven by investments in technology infrastructure......

From this point of view, the sky-high investment of Chinese and American technology giants will greatly affect the direction of the future technology game between major powers.

In the case of Alibaba, the 380 billion yuan plan not only set a record for the largest investment in cloud and AI hardware by a Chinese private enterprise, but also shows extraordinary determination. According to statistics from China Securities Construction Investment, from 2015 to 2024 (natural year), Alibaba's total investment in AI infrastructure (purchase of equipment and intangible assets, excluding land) is 327.2 billion yuan.

It can be said that Ali is betting on the future of intelligence with more strength than the sum of the past ten years. This is undoubtedly a weather vane.

Tencent, which has always been calm and steady, has also begun to speed up its efforts in dealing with AI. "Tencent Yuanbao", which once had little presence, has seen a surge in downloads after connecting to DeepSeek, rising from outside the top 200 in the free app list of the Apple App Store to second place.

The Economic Observer quoted insiders as saying that Ma Huateng once stated that "taking out the light bulb a month earlier" is not so important, and "there is no hurry to take out semi-finished products (to boost the stock price)". Tencent Ingot will only be officially launched in 2024, and it has not been given preferential treatment under the "horse racing" mechanism, and it does not even have permissions such as search entrances and uploading files.

Now, Tencent, which pays attention to "not in a hurry", has also changed. In just one week, more than 10 of Tencent's products have also collectively accessed DeepSeek-R1 and the hybrid model, staging a new law of "ecological integration speed determines AI life and death".

It can be said that this wave of "blitzkrieg" of the goose factory has once again taught people a lesson: compared with long-term success, it may be more important to take advantage of the situation.

ByteDance's response was also extremely fast, and it directly recruited Wu Yonghui, a big man who has been deeply involved in Google for 17 years. According to media reports, Wu Yonghui will report directly to CEO Liang Rubo, and must have begun to fight back.

Echoing the collective efforts of large manufacturers to develop AI, there is also the determination from the higher-ups:

In January, the National Artificial Intelligence Industry Investment Fund was formally established, with a scale of 60.1 billion yuan;

In February, the State-owned Assets Supervision and Administration Commission pointed out at the meeting on the deepening deployment of the "AI+" special action of central enterprises that it would make every effort to promote the integration of central enterprises into the national computing power layout and deepen cooperation with leading private enterprises and scientific research institutions.

The former means that after the semiconductor industry, artificial intelligence finally has its own big fund, and the latter shows that the bigwigs can not only sit back and enjoy the results, but also provoke the beams.

The three-dimensional offensive of top-level design, central state-owned enterprises taking the lead, and large factories charging has been quietly formed, and the trumpet of the charge has sounded.

2

When the three forces of policy, capital, and industry work together to develop artificial intelligence, the logic behind it becomes extremely clear:

Whoever falls behind in the age of AI could be kicked off the table.

Just look at the statements of the bigwigs - Wu Yongming said that "AI may be an industry change that occurs once in decades", and Ma Huateng "At first, I thought that (artificial intelligence) was an opportunity that the Internet would not encounter in ten years, but the more I thought about it, the more I felt that this was an opportunity that was not encountered in hundreds of years, similar to the industrial revolution of the invention of electricity".

This is not an exaggeration, and AI is seen as the key to breakthrough productivity.

For example, if a writer writes a long article, it may take 3 days to collect information and write, while DeepSeek may only take 3 minutes from the first draft to the polish. Not only is it efficient, but it is also of high quality, when the human pathologist spent a full 30 hours and carefully analyzed 130 slides, the accuracy rate was only 73.3%, but the accuracy rate of artificial intelligence was 88.5%......

Professor Schwab, founder of the World Economic Forum, divided the Industrial Revolution into four nodes:

The first was the invention of the steam engine, the second was the electrification revolution, the third was the computer revolution, and the fourth was the current artificial intelligence revolution.

The first two revolutions China did not catch up, and the third time we got on the bus halfway, this time, we are bound to participate in the whole process.

So nearly a decade ago, when Google AlphaGO completely subverted Go, everyone in China, from taxi drivers to university professors and scientists, talked about the possibility of AI commercialization. In just one year, 528 AI companies were born in China, and 371 AI investment and financing cases were born, a year-on-year increase of 38.9%; At the same time, Chinese AI companies applied for more than 9,000 AI patents, more than double the number of new patents in the United States.

Although that wave of investment frenzy cooled rapidly in the following years, the impact was far-reaching. The current blowout development of artificial intelligence is also a continuation of the waves caused by the frenzy of the year.

For example, DeepSeek, which is popular this time, is the High-Flyer Quant behind it that pays for its high R&D costs, and it was established exactly ten years ago - its two 10 billion quantitative private equity platforms "Zhejiang Jiuzhang Assets" and "Ningbo High-Flyer Quantitative" were established in June 2015 and February 2016 respectively, thus opening the era of "AI stock trading" with AI algorithms instead of traditional fund managers and handing over trading decisions to server clusters.

Therefore, Liang Wenfeng has followed the tide of artificial intelligence ten years ago, but the success of one thing not only depends on technological breakthroughs, but also requires the development of application scenarios and the cooperation of infrastructure. At that time, "Liang Wenfeng" could only hibernate, and at this time, it was the best time.

The advent of DeepSeek has rewritten the industry's understanding of artificial intelligence research and development in one fell swoop, as the "Government Hall 2019" said, this is like a "speed increase and fee reduction", similar to the "speed increase and fee reduction" of rail transit and the "speed increase and fee reduction" of mobile networks, which will promote the global AI market to carry out a "ten-year plan" structural readjustment.

Today, the rules in office buildings have changed, engineers and designers no longer need to build from scratch, and industrial fields such as mining and steel have also become intelligent, just as people could not imagine how elevators could run without people before.

When a new wave of technology investment quietly emerges, and all changes are already in the making, the next "DeepSeek moment" may come sooner.

In a higher dimension, this is a long-lasting great power game, and AI has become a symbol of sovereignty in the digital world. Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt submitted a 750-page report to the White House in 2019, with only one sentence at its core:

If the U.S. doesn't invest more, China will completely dominate the AI field.

Two years later, the report was approved by the White House.

China will dominate AI unless U.S. invests more, commission warns

Today, the smoke of gunfire has long filled the world.

3

For ordinary people, what opportunities will this surging wave of technology investment bring?

In a nutshell, maybe we're really starting to learn to adapt to a world of symbiosis with artificial general intelligence (AGI). It's "human-smart" machines that can do anything a human does, or even better.

For example, Wang Feiyue, a researcher at the Institute of Automation of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, said that one day in the future, we will see such a scene:

In the morning, the autonomous mode is completed, and the digital human scientist completes most of the work, and the time is more than 20 hours;

In the afternoon, it is a parallel mode, where humans guide robots and digital humans to complete tasks through remote control, and the time is less than 3 hours;

In the evening, it is the expert mode or emergency mode, and the human expert personally goes to the scene to complete the task with the robot digital human, and the time is less than 1 hour.

The coming year will enter the "1023" mode: leave home at 10 a.m. to work, leave the company at 2 p.m., work 3 days a week, and have a holiday on October 23 every year until January 23 of the following year, and all kinds of original holidays are still retained.

In 1970, a quote from Life magazine from Marvin Minsky was more graphic:

"We will have a machine with the general intelligence of the average person. I mean, a machine capable of reading Shakespeare, filling up a car, making cliques in the office, telling jokes, fighting. ”

Just like an old film that has recently become popular again, the "Noodle War" shown in "The Last Director of the Earth" starring Jia Zhangke and Ning Hao:

Director Jia thinks that no one knows more about noodles than him, a native of Shanxi, and thinks that noodles are too dry, so he asks the robot "Xiao Zhao" to add water

The robot "Xiao Zhao" thinks that "the golden ratio of face water is 3.45:1, which cannot be wrong"

When Jia Dao tried to use Shanxi's ancestral and noodle metaphysics for the 28th time to fight against the algorithmic hegemony of AI, the table was already piled with 72 bowls of noodles from capillary to trouser width......

What do we do when the robot becomes very stubborn, very unpersuadable, and starts to stick to its own ideas?

Just as many people now see DeepSeek subvert the work of copywriters, visual design, and even doctors, their first reaction is, will AI replace me?

Some people see AI as a tool to reduce costs and increase efficiency, but its impact on many "standardization" efforts will be drastic and far-reaching.

Kai-Fu Lee, who has held key positions at Apple, Microsoft and Google, and is engaged in AI commercialization, pointed out that AI may make the gap between the rich and the poor wider, the competition of ordinary people more fierce, and the technology giants can get more benefits in a shorter time.

Upper: Extremely wealthy AI elite

Mid-level: A relatively small number of employees working on complex tasks that involve a wide range of skills, a lot of strategic planning, and creativity

Lower: the largest social group – the ordinary people who are powerless to struggle

When the AI competition between countries becomes more and more intense, and a new round of scientific and technological revolution begins, it is impossible to reverse the trend of AI changing life.

For ordinary people, either embrace technology and find a new direction for work; Either return to a state of self-pursuit, do what you like, and understand and practice this sentence:

The meaning of life is more than work.